Quotes by Bill Viola

About Bill Viola:

Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist. He is considered a leading figure in the generation of artists whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.

Bill Viola

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil p...

Bill Viola

I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.

Bill Viola

Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.

Bill Viola

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

Bill Viola

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Bill Viola

A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.

Bill Viola

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Bill Viola

The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.

Bill Viola

Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of tim...

Bill Viola

When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.

Bill Viola

The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.

Bill Viola

There is a big push that we all are engaged in, in wanting to have the newest in innovation - and I think that's all really great. But I also feel that human beings need to be aware of, and grounded in, history.

Bill Viola

One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really b...

Bill Viola

Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity... but there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, ...

Bill Viola

Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.

Bill Viola

I cry a lot. Usually once a day. I think it's one of the most profound forms of human expression.

Bill Viola

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.

Bill Viola

Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

Bill Viola

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

Bill Viola

Author Bio

  • NameBill Viola
  • DescriptionAmerican video and installation artist
  • BornJanuary 25, 1951
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionArtist; Video Artist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Praemium Imperiale